I recently stumbled across an article which was published a
few years ago titled ‘The $300 Million Button’. It tells the tale of how one
simple change to a form on a major ecommerce site increased their revenue by
$300,000,000 a year.

The form was straight forward, it had two fields – ‘email
address’ and ‘password’, two buttons – ‘login’ and ‘register’ and a ‘forgot password’
link - a standard form that most people are familiar with. However it wasn’t
the form itself that was causing problems, it was the fact that this form
appeared after a customer had filled their shopping cart with products and was
ready to pay.

The form was designed in this way to enable repeat customers
to log in and make their purchase faster and they assumed first time buyers
wouldn’t mind registering because it would allow them to checkout faster in the
future.

That’s where they were massively wrong, usability tests were
conducted and the overwhelming response from first time buyers was "we are just
here to buy something, we don’t want to enter into a relationship”.

The form wasn’t popular with repeat customers either, often
they couldn’t remember which email/password combination they had registered and
had to go through the ‘forgot password’ process.

The $300,000,000 changeTo fix this issue, the designers simply replaced the ‘Register’
button with a ‘Continue’ button, next to the continue button was a message that
said "You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site.
Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases
even faster, you can create an account during checkout."

As a result of this
change, there was a 45% increase in the number of customers completing their
purchase – resulting in an additional $300,000,000 in revenue in a year.

How to do the same for your VP-ASP storeYou can enable a guest checkout feature on your VP-ASP store
with our One Page Checkout module. Not only does this feature allow your
customers to check out without registering, it also streamlines the checkout
process by allowing the customer to enter all of their information on a single
page.

How do I get One Page Checkout?The One Page Checkout module is available as a free
inclusion with our Premium Business Ready Plan or as a custom install for
VP-ASP version 7.0 users, please contact us for a quote if you are interested
in installing One Page Checkout in your existing store.

One Page Checkout will be available as an add-on for
VP-ASP version 8.0.